A commonly used electronic packaging process is for electrical “daughter” modules, such as circuit boards, to be plugged perpendicularly into respective sockets on a “motherboard”. The term motherboard is often used synonymously with the term backplane to describe a circuit board that contains sockets into which other circuit boards can be plugged in. The sockets provide both a physical mount and an electrical interconnect between the daughter boards (modules) and the backplane (motherboard). Usually the backplane is incorporated into rack that may include a chassis or an enclosure that surrounds and protects the circuit boards. The rack may be supplied with guides such as slots for guiding the boards into proper position for mating with the sockets and further to support the daughter boards with respect to the enclosure or chassis.
More recently, electronic modules have used high density electrical connectors. The previously used guide slots usually are not accurate enough to ensure proper seating and mating of the connector contacts at the leading edge of the module with the sockets in the back plane. Consequently, pin and socket alignment devices have been employed to precisely register the leading edge of a module with the respective socket.
Unrelated to the alignment problem is another problem affecting present day electronic modules, such other problem being heat. More modern electronic devices have ever increasing density and this results in exponential growth of waste heat. Cooling fans have been employed to cool electronic devices, but newer designs have high heat fluxes that cannot be adequately addressed by forced air cooling. Consequently, more designers are turning to liquid cooling. This involves the use of fluid couplings between the modules and the rack. One approach is to add blind fluid quick-connect couplings to the modules and rack. To accommodate the couplings along with the required alignment pins and sockets, the modules have been made wider. This has the undesirable drawback that the slots must be made oversized and no longer will the normal sized cards fit in the rack.